In 2016 and 2017, I did successive one-time-only performance pieces that involved ultra-personal hour-long stories of my life being read out to me for the first time in front of an audience.

The first, dubbed “Nobody’s idea of a good time,” was a recording of my own voice I had made six months prior and never listened to. The second, “Nobody thought this needed a sequel,” was a cold read by someone I cast from Backstage – again, six months later.

This is the only existing image of the first. There is nothing from the second.

While looking for actors for the sequel, at least a half dozen people noted in their applications that the concept reminded them of playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s show White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. I had never heard of it, but I was fascinated: Soleimanpour had written the show while he was unable to leave his home country of Iran because of his refusal to join the military. But he wanted his words to be told around the world, and he felt compelled to make a play that could be done without him there while making his absence clearly felt. It would be a show with no director or rehearsal; each night would be a new actor.

I was and am sad that I missed it – these auditions having been held just over two months after its New York run had ended – but there was nothing to be done about it, so I put it out of my mind. Until about a month ago, when I finally checked my auto-diverted “theater announcements” email folder and saw something about a show called Nassim. I didn’t realize immediately – but fortunately did before it was too late – that this was by the same man who made White Rabbit Red Rabbit, that this was the man’s self-titled follow-up to that show, and that it  had the same conceit of a new actor each night. I made it in right under the wire – during the last week of the run. And, fortunately, able to do so with an actor I like: Lee Pace – either Ronan the Accuser or Thranduil the Elvenking, depending on which kind of nerd you are.

Anyways, I’m here to talk aabout Nassim – the show but by extension the man (For clarity and also out of respect, I will say Nassim only when referring to the play and Soleimanpour when referring to its author and silent second player).

The set is minimal: on one side, a chair sits behind a desk, upon which is a box bearing the guest actor’s name. On the other side, a microphone stand. Between them, an X is taped on the floor. A projector screen is at the back.

The house lights rarely go down.

The show begins with a producer coming out and awkwardly introducing Lee Pace; she is reading a script and doing so poorly. It gives us the background – to Pace as well, since he knows exactly as much as we do and quite possibly less.

Nassim is 465 pages, we are told, which sounds like a joke, considering the previously announced 75-minute runtime. Also, it’s written in Farsi.

But don’t worry: It has been translated… mostly – though we’re not told that caveat.

The script, says the producer before departing, is in that box on the desk, easily big enough for 465 pages. But, there is just a single sheet. Clap, it tells Pace. And the projector turns on.

HERE, WE LEARN THE TRUE NATURE OF THE SHOW. A CLOSE-UP ON A STACK OF PAPER AND A PAIR OF HANDS. PACE WILL READ THE TEXT ON THE PAPER ALOUD. OR FOLLOW THE ITALICIZED INSTRUCTION. AND THE HANDS WILL MOVE ON. AT FIRST I THINK IT’S A PRE-RECORDED VIDEO SEQUENCE.

It’s not.

Performances of White Rabbit Red Rabbit left an empty seat in the front row to symbolize Soleimanpour’s forced absence. But with the show that bears his name, he is sitting backstage, directing with nothing but paper, a pen, and his hands – his confinement having ended in 2013.

It’s incredible how much can be expressed with so little.

Nassim is about language. And connection. And how language connects us. It was written in Farsi, but it has never been performed that way – indeed, it wouldn’t really make sense that way.

For us, it was in English, but Nassim has played all over the world in a variety of languages in the two years since it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe: Germany, Italy, Belgium, Chile, Korea, Japan, China – each in that country’s tongue.

But.

Farsi is not just the show’s original language – it is also a central focus. Many, many pages of the script are dedicated to the teaching of a simple story in a language that not-so-many Americans have probably even heard.

Yeki bood. Yeki nabood: Once upon a time. And if you think it’s weird hearing me stumble over those words after having several days to think them over, imagine Lee Pace flailing his way through his first time ever seen them. Or any of the other folks who did this.

That’s the show.

Though I know it showed in other languages, I can’t help but feel it’s most powerful in America and other English-speaking countries. Because even though most of us are asked to take a language in school, how many people really take that seriously? How many need to?

In 2015, I was taking an overnight train from Prague to Budapest. In my car was a couple: a Czech man and Hungarian woman. Yet they spoke to each other in English. Because English is the closest thing this world has to a universal language, something I was vaguely aware of but had never truly appreciated until I heard these two express affection in my mother tongue and not theirs.

People all over the world are raised at least bilingual – and even those who aren’t are endlessly subjected to, if nothing else, English-language media; they have a greater understanding and presumably appreciation for language than someone like me who can take his English for granted.

I don’t know if Lee Pace knows any other languages, but I can guarantee that many of the people who graced that stage over the months did not. And to see them struggle with this unexpected language lesson gives a profound sense of how everyone else in the world feels or has felt. At the very least, how Soleimanpour has.

Again, this has been performed all over the world. And at every performance he has asked the audience to give him an interesting word, one that he then adds to this global compendium. Someone recommends onomatopoeia, a word I have remembered how to spell since third grade because on-o-mat-o-poe-i-a; Pace misspells it, forgetting the fourth “o”; Soleimanpour shows us the book as he looks for the next open spot; words in Mandarin, Korean, German, Spanish. In English in all countries, we see how many others had given the same word – mostly with the same misspelling, because we are collectively failing this man.

He gets to New York, the only American city in which it’s played, and points out each instance of the most common word: Impeachment

Because that man is failing us.

Pace is asked to say and then define his favorite swear – in verb form, please. And we watch a grown man awkwardly shift around because he feels uncomfortable telling a room of adults what “fuck” means. Eventually, he comes up with just, ya know, “to fuck.”

And that’s what we’re all really here to see: thid guest actor struggling through the tasks given to him over these 465 sheets of paper by at first by a disembodied pair of hands and eventually Soleimanpour himself.

To me, the total visibility of the script is really what makes Nassim stand out: everything is on display; there are no tricks that the audience can’t see that the guest actor can. It guarantees a radically honest show and a radically honest performance.

My own cold read was not quite that. While the reader had indeed never seen a word of it, she went in prepared for the trick that we would both be playing on the audience. Early on, she would tell them that she was allowed to go off-book. She would then make an off-hand comment to prove it.

What only the two of us knew is that I wrote that comment. And all of her “improvised” asides.

This show was about revealing things I didn’t want to reveal but did anyway because capital-a Art; and to really get at the heart of the internal turmoil I was trying to convey, I had to lie to my audience of five.

Ya know, lying to tell the truth: the very heart of narrative storytelling

And there are likely some mistruths in Nassim for the same reason – a couple of staged moments feel like just that, but what goes on within the confines of this black box is an almost magical purity of performance unlike anything I have ever seen. I’m not even sure I want to call it a performance. Because performance here would imply that there’s something deeper beneath this real-time reaction. I have no doubt that Lee Pace expected to give a performance when he walked into the room, but I genuinely believe that we were just watching the man himself struggle.

I mean, if we weren’t, we would have gotten a better definition of “Fuck.”

Nine-Point-Two out of Ten

In early 2016, I went to the Criterion Collection offices for a press screening of Agnieszka Smoczynska’s mermaid murder musical The Lure. I was curious about the film, but I attended the screening almost entirely because of its location; getting to walk the halls where *The* Criterion was collection-ed? A dream. And sure, they’re not particularly long halls, but so what? They’re covered in big beautiful 24x36s of cinema’s truest classics.

On the way to the bathroom, I passed through what I assume was the filling room. Discs overflowed the shelves and littered the tables. I was told that there was some overstock and that kids from underprivileged neighborhoods were going to be coming in to take it off their hands.

I wanted so badly to take some for myself.

…

In case you don’t know what the gosh darn heck I’m talking about: the Criterion Collection was founded back in the mid-80s as a company dedicated to “Deepen[ing] the viewer’s appreciation of the art of film.”

If you ever wondered how special features became a thing – Criterion did it first back in the Laserdisc days, then moving into DVD and Blu-ray. And now, their own streaming platform.

But it’s been a long road to get here.

Back when I first started subscribing to Hulu Plus, I did so in part because they had a partnership with Criterion, and many of the Collection’s films were included with the price of entry. It made the already-pretty-good-deal very good indeed, though I didn’t use it nearly as much as I should have. So, when the deal ended and Criterion went over to TCM’s Filmstruck, I didn’t follow.

Folks like me are probably the reason that Filmstruck is dead. Sorry. But from its ashes rose the only thing I cared about, that independent service dedicated to the Collection: the Criterion Channel, which officially launched just a couple weeks ago.

As someone who is watching this video, you have the technology necessary to access the Channel. It’s pretty much everywhere except game consoles. At the time of recording, actually doing so can be an occasionally frustrating experience… but I’m not interested in that here. Bugs get quashed. Features get added. Static video reviews become obsolete.

But not this one!

Because what matters to me is not the execution of The Criterion Channel’s Roku interface but that of its purpose. How well it channels that mission to “Deepen the viewer’s appreciation of the art of film.”

Spoiler alert: Pretty well.

See, what makes the Criterion Channel unique is not just the catalog – though that’s at least above average and something we will discuss in a bit – but everything that comes with it. You can feel confident when watching a Criterion release that it is the highest quality transfer available, which can be something of a gamble on other services, particularly when it comes to more niche or foreign films. But even more significantly, many films have extras taken straight from their home release: commentary tracks, interviews, feature-length retrospective documentaries, et cetera.

For example, I inaugurated the service for myself with the 1923 Harold Lloyd vehicle Safety Last! I’m ashamed to admit that I had never seen any of his films before, despite my general appreciation for silent comedies, and this seemed like a good opportunity to right that wrong. If you’ve missed out as well, the film is well worth watching, and not just for its iconic clock-hanging shot. Nearly 100 years later, it is still a hilarious and relatable-ish tale of a man who will go to incredible lengths to convince the love of his life that he isn’t actually a total shmuck.

And how can you watch that without immediately needing to know more? Fortunately, the Criterion Channel was happy to oblige. I went with “Locations and Effects,” a 20-minute documentary about the production of Lloyd’s more harrowing stunts, using Safety Last! as the prime but not exclusive example while also giving some greater context for how others used the same or similar techniques. But I could have gone so much deeper. Also available are a Safety Last! commentary track, a nearly-two-hour-long documentary about Harold Lloyd, three shorts starring Lloyd, and more.

And that’s the value here. Where Netflix et al make decisions based on algorithm, the Criterion Channel is a distinctly human affair. Discovery doesn’t happen by scrolling through buckets of weirdly specific genres based on a complex tagging system: it happens by trusting people who have dedicated their lives to cinema.

The curation takes a variety of forms. Perhaps it’s a full-on series, like the six woman-directed shorts programmed together as part of their ongoing “Shorts for Days” segment, or “Columbia Noir,” a showcase of 11 noirs produced by Columbia Pictures between 1945 and 1962. Or perhaps it’s a more traditional double feature or even a short+feature pairing of the type you only see at festivals or with a Pixar release.

With each, a filmed introduction explains the vision for the collection and how it came to be. A personal favorite from these first few weeks is dubbed L’amour Kung Fu, putting Jacques Demy’s musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg alongside John Woo’s swordsman-out-for-revenge-r Last Hurrah for Chivalry – a pairing justified by none other than Grady Hendrix, who you may not know but is literally one of my favorite people in the world and I was so excited to see him on my television.

And more are constantly being added, with the plan being that every single day is some new thing being highlighted for you to watch. It may not be programmatically personalized, but it is programmed.

Of course, we have to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the actual catalog of the Criterion Channel. As I said, this selection is at least above average and I’m underselling it there. Sight largely unseen, I would say there’s probably not a single bad film on the service. Or perhaps that there aren’t any not worth your time.  And for those who may think that it’s a purely pretentious enterprise: don’t. Ten of Ishiro Honda’s Japanese monster movies spanning two decades, from 1954’s Godzilla to 1975’s Terror of Mecha-Godzilla, are available to stream. As are all four films from Eclipse Series 37: When Horror Came to Shochiku, which are films I’ve wanted to check out ever since I missed the Goke: Body Snatcher from Hell screening at the 2012 New York Asian Film Festival.

It is awesome that that is all available to me now.

But there are well over 1000 films in the Criterion Collection, and though the Channel claims similar raw numbers, there’s just a lot that’s missing. And there always will be, for two reasons:

1. Rights are complicated. Just because the Criterion Collection was able to release a special edition DVD of something a decade ago doesn’t mean they have any claim to that film now; and even if they do, that agreement probably doesn’t cover streaming rights.
2. The Criterion Channel is in direct competition with the Criterion Collection.

To explain what I mean, let’s take, uh, Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. It’s incredible, one of my favorites of all time, as evidenced by the fact that I have a framed poster of it. So I have been anxiously awaiting a high-def home release ever since I first saw it back in 2010 and was, of course, ecstatic when it was announced that the film would finally be getting a proper Blu-ray in January of this year. And, of course, I bought it.

But what if I had known it was going to be on the Criterion Channel so soon after release? Would I still have done so? Maybe, but probably not. Criterion discs are expensive, and also the company’s main business; they can’t really afford to completely cannibalize that.

And so every film that is or isn’t available says something. You can stream Guillermo Del Toro’s Kronos, but not The Devil’s Backbone or Pan’s Labyrinth, despite the fact that the three together formed a box set a couple years back. Though 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days cannot be streamed, Mungiu’s follow-up Beyond the Hills can be.

The first criterion disc I ever bought, Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, isn’t available, nor is anything by Richard Linklater.

And while it’s possible that in time at least some of these will pop up on the service, who knows how long any given film will be available; the Channel, as with all things digital, will see films come and go to augment it’s Permanent Collection – whatever that actually consists of.

So, to answer the critical question: No, the Criterion Channel is not a replacement for the Criterion Collection as a whole. And as the ending of the deal with Hulu and the collapse of Filmstruck indicate, there is a level of precariousness to the entire enterprise. Hausu may be on the channel, but I feel good about having just bought a Blu-ray copy nonetheless.

All that said, taken as its own entity, the Channel has already justified its place in the ever-more-crowded streaming space.

Unlike the competition, the Criterion Channel is focused on celebrating history rather than defining the future. It is there to make the film canon accessible by way of a not-low-but-perfectly-reasonable-especially-in-context-with-the-cost-of-their-physical-releases monthly fee. And even in these early stages, it has succeeded. I have no doubt it will only get better from here.

Eight-Point-Two Out of Ten

The way I listen to music, I have been told, is… odd. Oftentimes, I will find a single track that just grabs me and listen to nothing else for literal days. On rare occasions, I will fall in love with an entire album, and walk the streets of Seoul for four days exclusively to The Bunny The Bear’s The Way We Rust.

I genuinely enjoy that, the repeating of a great song over and over again until it turns into danceable white noise.

Which is what happens: I’m not studying or even attempting to retain these songs. Heck, there are songs I have listened to upwards of a thousand times that I still don’t know the words to – though in my defense, I listen to a lot of music where the lyrics can be difficult to decipher.

Hello, and welcome to The Week I Review. My name is The Kinda Guy Who Sits During Metal Shows, and today I’m talking about a band that has put together a number of songs that I have lost days to and also went to see perform approximately 59 hours before this video is getting posted: Dance Gavin Dance.

DGD, as the cool kids probably call them, was actually introduced to me by my girlfriend, which was a clarifying moment both musically and romantically. She played for me Chucky vs. the Giant Tortoise from their 2016 release Mothership, which she had developed an obsession of her own for. And right from the opening I was hooked.

The most immediately arresting thing isn’t the virtuosic instrumentalism but the incredible contrast between Tilian Pearson’s awesomely high notes and Jon Mess’s guttural growls. Two great tastes that truly taste great together.

Now, that’s a fairly common combination in post-hardcore, so much so that it could almost be seen as a defining characteristic of the genre… but no one does it better. And it’s really thanks to Pearson, because his vocal quality is unique in general but particularly with this kind of music.

A lot of clean vocalists in the genre are pretty interchangeable. That isn’t to say untalented, but there’s this raw intensity that kinda locks these folks into post-hardcore or something heavier. Because intense vocals like that practically require music that matches their viscerality. Even when the music gets lighter, it can never really leave the genre because of their voices.

Pearson, who took over in 2012 from less-unique-though-still-certainly-talented vocalists, is actually kind of the opposite. While he can do intensity, as evidenced on songs like Mothership’s “Inspire the Liars,” that’s not typical. Instead, he just sounds comfortable up on those crazy high notes, no strain or push – a little breathy, perhaps, but certainly not in a bad way. It’s a voice that could show up in any genre and stand out only for the right reasons.

Which is good, because their songs swing from heavy as hell to groovy as heck at a moment’s notice, and if you were to listen to the first minute of, say, Instant Gratifications “Death of a Strawberry,” you would just assume they were alt-rock. Only when Jon Mess comes 85 seconds into the track would you think something was different. Of course, this in direct contrast to the way they handle Chucky vs. the Giant Tortoise or Artificial Selection’s penultimate track, Bloodsucker, which opens with 30 seconds of intensity and screaming before Pearson comes in, but even here he comes in over this more intense music and *he* is the one who sounds out of place.

But that’s precisely why it works. Because his voice in that context is so unexpected but so objectively impressive that you’re caught off guard and immediately enamored. The way the two are integrated with or actively contrast against the melodies underneath is what makes the band so dynamic and fun to listen to.

And fun to see, too.

There was a video passed around on Twitter a couple weeks ago of a security guy at a Dance Gavin Dance show completely bewildered by Chucky vs. the Giant Tortoise; Pearson called him a Legend. https://twitter.com/logan_kale27/status/1113515228061270016

It’s a good reaction, one that makes sense if you’re being thrown into this sort of thing for the first time. Especially because of the joy with which it’s performed. One thing I like about their live show is the little electronic interludes that are played between tracks. Sometimes they’re like distorted versions of songs, while others it seems like something else entirely, but it keeps the energy up even while folks are changing instruments or telling New York how much they appreciate us all coming out.

And then, once they get into the songs, they *crush* it.

I have long preferred a quality live performance to a studio one, but not every band can really hack it live. Immediately before Dance Gavin Dance on Friday was Periphery, a band who I have now seen and been underwhelmed by twice. While I think Spencer Sotelo’s scream is cooler live, his clean vocals are too weak by comparison, and it’s frustrating.

On the other hand, both Pearson and Mess sound fantastic. Mess sounds exactly the same as he does on the record, while the minor dip from perfection on Pearson’s part is more than made up for by his performative energy.

It’s kinda funny, actually, how different the two singers are in performance as well as style. Mess just doesn’t move around much, and he absolutely locks in place while he’s screaming. Pearson, on the other hand, is more typical in that he constantly moves across the stage, whether he’s singing or not. Especially when he’s not, because he uses Mess’s verses as a time to practice some incredibly sensual body rolls. It’s all a little silly.

Much moreso if you actually look into what they’re saying –Mess in particular. Chucky vs The Giant Tortoise is a pretty good example, what with the line “Riding a rhino pico de gallo,” but I think the perfect verse is his first from Artificial Selection’s Midnight Crusade:

Brontosaurs fear of art is torn apart by making
Good mistakes and branching out he switch it up like baking
The more I tried to sleep it off the more I started thinking
I wanna live in mushroom park, do unrestricted shrinking

That’s hilarious. And Pearson? Well, he threatens to take your confetti away.

This ability to be light amidst all the angsty anger of their genre is so refreshing. A lot of their music deals with pretty heavy themes, but there’s a levity to their own production that really brings it all together. They don’t take things too seriously, and their work is so much better for it.

And that’s, ultimately, what it comes down to. Dance Gavin Dance feels like a band that hasn’t compromised. That they’re actually just a bunch of weird dudes who really like making weird music and have somehow found this huge success in the process. Like they’re getting away with something crazy. You listen to their music and you see them perform and it’s so clear how much they love what they’re doing. You just have to love it too.

Or, at least, I do.

Nine-Point-Three out of Ten

A few months ago, I went to Gotham comedy club with my sister. The line-up was, as to be expected, of varying quality. But there was one guy in particular who was having a very bad night. In the audience’s defense, he really wasn’t that funny. His joke framing device was weird and the punchlines themselves contradictory. A drunk woman in the back asked for (well, demanded) some clarification. It got personal. The energy got real weird, and when his time was up, he just sort of shrugged and handed the mic back to the host.

I thought about this during James Acaster’s late-night performance of his show Cold Lasagna Hate Myself 1999 at Littlefield in Brooklyn last week.

Like Daniel Sloss, whose show X I reviewed here some number of weeks back, Acaster is a comedian from the UK (though English rather than Scottish) who I first saw thanks to the simultaneous release of multiple specials on Netflix. And, like Daniel Sloss, it was specifically a recommendation by Phillip DeFranco that pushed me to check them out.

The shows, collectively titled Repertoire, are very funny and I highly recommend checking them out. I hope this one ends up on Netflix too. But not, as with X, because I think everyone else needs to see the show; it’s more selfish than that: I want to see it. Because what I saw at Littlefield was not actually Cold Lasagna Hate Myself 1999. I’m still not entirely sure what it was.

Hi, by the way. Welcome to The Week I Review. My name is Mid-Tier Comedy Fan, and today I’m talking about… that show.

It was Acaster’s second show of the night. The first one ended less than thirty minutes before the doors of the second opened. And though the show didn’t start until 10:30, he came out onstage at 10 anyway.

He sat there in an iredescent jacket and sunglasses, holding his phone and a black iPod classic, changing the music wildly and frequently.

A gift and head of cabbage were placed on the stage. He opened a gift. It looked like Robitussin. He removed the head of cabbage. My companion, an Acaster super-fan, told me later that that was A Thing.

He played the first half of the song Euroleague by Paul Williams five times over that half hour, on each the lights would change and he would look out into the crowd and we’d wonder if it was starting early, but no. He’d go back to the stool and check his phone some more. He replied to a tweet my super-fan friend tagged him in.

As the starting time drew closer, the gaps between plays shrank; eventually he was literally cutting the song off mid-way to start it again.

Euroleague – at least in its first half; I haven’t listened to the second – is about having a not-so-great 2017 but pushing past it: getting back on the grind in 2018. While in 2019, it seems a little dated, it wouldn’t have felt so when he started doing this a year ago.

Eventually, we would learn the thematic connection to the song: that the 1999 in the show’s name really meant nothing and it was actually about 2017. He was going to tell us the story of his dirty rotten no good very bad year. A year where he lost a girlfriend, an agent, and… I think there was a third thing, but I don’t actually know, because we never heard the story. We never really heard any of the stories.

After the first extended bit of the show, a 20-minute-or-so run about a breakup he had in 2013, he did something interesting: he addressed us directly and asked us please not tweet about it. I’ve heard this before, and it’s pretty much always the same reason: because people tend to miss the point because most of us just… aren’t funny. He mentioned Twitter specifically, but I imagine he’d find it at least as frustrating for me to relay it here, so I won’t. Because I wouldn’t be able to do justice to his threading of that needle. Suffice it to say it’s a great story.

I don’t know if that line about Twitter was an official part of the show or a diss at Brooklyn (or maybe American audiences more generally), but it set a new tone with this particular audience, one that ultimately overtook the entire set.

Littlefield is a small venue, but it was crowded – being a sold-out show and all that. I was right up at the front of the standing-room-only crowd, probably 30 feet from the stage. About fifteen feet to my left were a trio of girls who couldn’t have been older than 22. Maybe they were even younger but had quality fakes. In any case, they were drunk. And they were talking. Not heckling or anything, like that woman at Gotham had been. Just… talking. To each other. Like no one else was even there, and there wasn’t a show going on.

This happened for a long time before anyone said anything, and it was ultimately James Acaster himself who did so. As he geared up to reenact a mental breakdown he had on a telephone call in 2017, he paused and asked them to stop. The worst offender attempted to explain herself: “I was putting on lipstick,” she said.

And, of course, there was disbelief. “It seems to me that that’s one of those activities that is made significantly harder by talking.” She said something else. He told her that he hated her. Then it got weird.

I was in full agreement, but apparently the crowd wasn’t. Or, that was the impression that he had gotten, because he immediately felt compelled to justify himself. He talked about differences between American and British audiences, and about the fact that he likes being in a job where can tell garbage people that he hates them and couldn’t we all be so lucky, and he was confused about why people were on her side when she was *still freaking talking* during this whole rant! And suddenly we’re fifteen minutes past the point where he was supposed to have started that phone call.

He tried to get back into the headspace, but then a bottle fell at the bar and the moment was lost. He gave up and decided to just skip the bit entirely. “We’ll go back to it at the end,” he promised.

We didn’t.

I assume that what followed, a bit about his home town of Kettering, was part of the show that we had tickets to see. But then, with half an hour left to go, he said that he was so glad the show was almost over before realizing there was a full third of the performance left to go. He then apologized for not sounding more excited that there was half an hour left. (I found this hilarious.)

But then, instead of going back to the bit that he cut off mid-thought, he thought for a few moments and said “I know what I’ll do. I’m gonna talk about Bake Off” – or, as Netflix has decided to call it state-side, The Great British Baking Show.

This… was new. James Acaster’s appearance on the Great Celebrity Bake Off aired just a few weeks ago, so an extended sequence about his experience behind the scenes couldn’t have been part of this show he had been performing for the past year.

What it actually felt like was something he was working out for his next special. And it was very funny. Sad, too – tonally fitting right in with the rest of the set – but as someone who is a big fan of the show, there was some interesting insight into it alongside all the humor and pathos. Still, it wasn’t totally ironed out: literally the last thing he said – the last joke of the entire show – was immediately recanted as an uncalled-for ad lib: a bit of Paul Hollywood body shaming.

At the very beginning of the performance, he made a bunch of remarks about quoteunquote Edgy comedians, folks like Ricky Gervais who have given up on trying to be clever, instead doubling down on lazily insulting marginalized groups. He did so while saying that he was not going to be one of them. Between the audience insults and the body-shaming, he admitted, he kinda was.

Which is funny.

I hadn’t watched the Bake Off episode yet. And doing so afterwards was fascinating. The context that Acaster gave for his genuinely bizarre appearance really adds to the whole thing. My favorite fact? He was stirring that crème pat for 45 minutes.

But perhaps just as interesting were the inconsistencies between his stories and the show itself: the specific details he added to certain moments were just straight-up wrong: he said that he was asked for six “Identical” cream horns during the technical but the host said no such thing; he was asked for Identical flapjacks in the Signature. He described a bit that the hosts did as they called for 30 minutes when that bit actually came at the half-way point.

Of course, these little details don’t matter. But they serve as a fascinating example of two things:

1. How memory is unreliable. Every time a story is retold, it goes back into memory anew. So over time, as something is repeated, the details shift. It’s why eyewitness accounts are really rather unreliable in court proceedings. This fits with the bit about the hosts and their marshmallow gun, since the timing of that is irrelevant to the joke itself; and
2. How little tweaks make a story more compelling. Here’s a fun fact: I intentionally fudged one part of the pre-show timeline that I discussed at the beginning of this video. While it is true that James Acaster did respond to a photo my friend tagged him in on Twitter before the show began, he actually did it while we were waiting outside for the doors to open. He was on his phone while he sat up on the stage, just not doing the thing I said he did. But the story flows better the way that I told it. Just as the “identical” thing does the way Acaster did.

When he finally left the stage, he restarted Paul Williams’ Euroleague. After a rough 2017, he’d be back on his grind the following year.

Its irrelevance to the performance that we had just seen felt like its own kind of joke, a coda to the show that we were supposed to see but never did.

James Acaster told us that, though it may have seemed like a uniquely memorable performance, he was going to have forgotten it by Friday. I don’t really doubt him. By the time this video goes up, he’ll have performed it at least a dozen more times. Those shows probably went better… or maybe they were worse. Regardless, they’ll all just blur together.

But you know who is never going to forget this show?

Me.

Eight Point Zero out of Ten

It may or may not surprise you to learn that I am the type of person who sees a Kickstarter for sheets with silver threading and then immediately backs it even though I didn’t actually have a mattress at the time. When the same company made a Kickstarter for silver towels a few years later, I was all up on too. You see, silver is naturally anti-microbial and anti-odor, and I both hate doing laundry and live in an apartment building that doesn’t have a washing machine in the first place.

So I like to buy things that have silver in them, even if they cost a little bit more.

A few years ago, I made a clothing change that few people would ever notice: I stopped wearing boxers. But a girl I met on tinder told me they looked bad on me and so I immediately threw away every single pair, because at that point in my life that seemed like a rational reaction to such criticism.

Being not even vaguely confident enough for briefs proper, I decided to go for that nice middle ground. This was the heyday of MeUndies sponsoring every single podcast that I listened to, so I figured it was time to give some internet underwear a shot. The pairs I ordered were both too small and, much to my chagrin, did not have a fly. My first day wearing them, I got, uh, caught in my zipper and yelped in pain in my literally at-capacity office bathroom. I was so mortified that I never wore them again. I got some generic ones at Macy’s and went on with my life.

A few months later, at the Wirecutter’s recommendation, I got a few pairs of Uniqlo Airisms. And I liked them immediately. For a year or so, that was enough.

But then I started getting daily Facebook ads for Mack Weldon’s Vesper Polo. I had heard of the company because they advertised on The Flop House podcast, which was the only one that went with them instead of MeUndies. And I really did like the way that Polo looked, inspired as it was by James Bond. So I checked out their website.

And lo and behold: Silver.

This was last May.

Mack Weldon has a loyalty program called Weldon Blue. You don’t have to sign up for a credit card or give up the contents of your genetic code; you just need to buy things. After your first order, you are instantly a part of level one: free shipping on any order, rather than just those over $50. You also get 10% off orders above $100.

If you spend over $200 within a year, you get upgraded to Level 2, giving you a 20% discount on all others as well as some other things that are less meaningful.

I like this. I also realize that I’m getting played.

Because this means that everything that Mack Weldon sells has a 20% markup on top of the typical retail markup, because their business model must be built to be sustainable even if every customer were Weldon Blue Level Two.

To go deeper into the cynicism, there’s a psychological factor to discounts. The famous JC Penny experiment where the company stopped lying about everything being on sale and instead posting the “sale” price as the real price was a total failure. Shoppers didn’t care about the actual price of the item; it was the relationship between that price and the arbitrarily higher number posted beside it People love to feel like they’re getting a deal.

Let’s be real, Mack Weldon products aren’t cheap, and hitting that initial $200 benchmark isn’t hard. I did it on literally my first order. Hell, even with my discount, those two pairs of boxer briefs still cost $54. And sure, there’s literal silver in them – the non-silver options, which I also have a few pairs of – are quite a bit cheaper, but… you can get two pairs of Uniqlo Airisms for less than the cheapest Mack Weldon underwear, and that’s after a discount. But I’m at the point in my life where I’m okay spending a bit more than I historically would have when something is higher quality.

I mean, the old adage is that you get what you pay for, and it is true – up to a point. Expensive things typically cost more to make. Of course, it’s a question of proportion. For example, my colleague’s wife worked for a high-end swimwear company, the kind that charges literally hundreds of dollars for a bathing suit. And their swimsuits were objectively higher quality than your typical one, costing several times as much to make. Except we’re actually talking about a total cost of around $18 as opposed to, like, $2. It’s a better product but a markup that is out of reach for most people. Certainly including myself.

I wouldn’t spend several hundred dollars on a bathing suit, regardless of the wholesale cost… but I did spend $70ish twice on pairs from Mack Weldon for my trip to Mexico, and I don’t regret having done so. They’re great. The best bathing suits I own. They fit well, which is pretty important for clothing, and I think look good too.

But I also wouldn’t have spent the $90ish per suit that they cost without my 20% discount. And seeing the number in the cart all crossed out with what I viewed as an ultimtely more reasonable below made me feel better about what was still a fairly big expense on something I don’t use all that much. And there’s a pressure to keep spending money there to stay in that Level Two tier, because I want to keep getting those discounts because I really don’t have any desire to pay the “actual” prices.

But, it’s also not like I’m not getting some really great clothing out of the whole thing. I have been impressed by the quality of every piece of Mack Weldon clothing I own. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t keep buying new ones. I would end up wearing something of theirs almost every single day.

And that really speaks to my appreciation of the brand more than any of the words you have just heard or could hear. Tbh, this could have been like 85 words long. But I just really, really like typing.

Ha.

Eight Point Four out of Ten